Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

Kisses honeyed by oblivion.

Ignorance ... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer.